Cooperative – Random Geek Child

Time to Face The Reckoners!

Actually, time to be the Reckoners! The Reckoners board game is based off the Brandon Sanderson series of the same name, following a group of rebels (the Reckoners) as they challenge superpowered megalomaniacs like the Epic Steelheart. Appropriately, it’s a cooperative game, featuring a team of 1-6 players coordinating to defeat Steelheart before he wipes out the population.

That’s more complicated than it sounds, naturally. Steelheart has a lot of lackeys hanging about the city making life difficult, and whenever you defeat one, another takes their place. You have to defeat them, though, as left unchecked these Epics will devastate both the population and your efforts at defeating their boss.

The short version is this: players each have a character ability and dice, and each turn everyone rolls up to three times to determine their actions for the round. These include wiping out Enforcement (which accelerate the rate at which Epics grow more destructive), containing Epic abilities (the ways that they’re destructive), researching Epics’ weaknesses (to lower their health or, if they have a prime invincibility, to render them mortal), attacking Epics, and acquiring Plan Tokens or money. Plan Tokens act as wild dice, and dice in general are also used to move between parts of the city and take down barricades. The Reckoners will take their actions, cash in the rewards for any Epics they’ve killed, and purchase nifty gadgets to make their jobs easier. The Epics, in turn, will repopulate the vacant City Districts and activate their abilities, including Steelheart’s, who then moves to a random location. This is especially inconvenient, as you have to be in the same City District as an Epic to affect them. Steelheart also has a prime invincibility, so you have to research his weakness before you can deal him any damage.

The first time we played this, it wound up being a slow and calculated damage race between Steelheart’s health and the remaining population, won only barely. The second and third times, the damage part proved to be our strength. It helped that we played with Megan, whose character ability is turning one containment die into three attacks, and helped even more when we got her an Equipment Card that turned one anti-Enforcement die into three containments. In the picture below, she had the potential to do twenty-seven damage in one turn, or more if she used her Plan Tokens. Yeah… Steelheart didn’t stand a chance.

If you can’t tell by the fact that I’ve played it repeatedly, I adore this game. I loved the books, and to see them adapted so well into a board game I can play with my fellow fans is perpetually exciting! It’s heavy in both strategy and luck, and no matter what difficulty you play it at, a plan well-executed is always something to celebrate.

The Captain is Dead?!

The Captain is Dead is a cooperative board game reminiscent of Star Trek, in which characters of various color-coded skillsets work together to fend off an alien attack and repair the Jump Drive of their starship.

Characters start in the rooms of the ship that correspond to their skillsets. For example, the Teleporter Chief starts in Engineering. Each room (except the hallways) has Systems that provide useful bonuses while operational but can be damaged by Alerts. Alerts represent the damage done by the alien ship and are drawn after each player’s turn; if External Scanners are operational, you have the benefit of getting to see the next couple in advance before they hit! Some of the more inconvenient Alerts are Anomalies, which stay in play and have a continued effect until you research them away: Alien Ships, which join the one attacking you and amplify damages; and Hostile Aliens, which invade the ship and limit movement. And of course, many Alerts knock Systems offline.

Systems are repaired by a combination of Skill cards and actions. Each character has a set number of actions per turn, a rank to determine turn order, and a special ability – the first game, I played the Cyborg, who’s immune to Anomalies. Some of them also have Skill discounts. The Admiral, for example, has 2 Command discounts, so when that player would need to spend Command cards, they subtract 2 from the cost. This kind of spending also applies to Battle Plans and Upgrades. The former is a single-use advantage obtained in the War Room, while the latter are new Systems that can be researched and installed in the Science Lab. These especially are massive game changers! Our favorite was Epinephrine Ventilation, which gives everyone an extra action.

The victory condition is simple: repair the Jump Drive! Unfortunately, there are many ways to lose before you can. If you take damage that would lower your shields past 0%, have to add more Hostile Aliens to your ship than there are Hostile Aliens left, or have to draw an Alert when there are none left to play, the game is over and the crew has lost. In our first game, the one in the photo, we were so focused on fixing Systems we lost track of the Hostile Aliens and were overrun! The second game, though, we managed to get two Upgrades installed early, and rode that advantage to victory. It all depends on your characters and the cards!

C’mon, it’s Harvest Time!

…just ignore the part where I’m posting this in April. In the Midwest. Because hey, the board game Harvest Time is pan-seasonal! It’s also from the same company as Max, The Secret Door, Eyes of the Jungle, and Caves & Claws, which seems to always be good for some simple, cooperative fun.

In this particular game, players are trying to harvest their vegetables before winter comes. There are four gardens – if you have more than four players have some team up on the same gardens, or if you have gardens to spare, a particularly ambitious player might tend multiples.

In standard gameplay, you start with your garden prepopulated – four types of vegetables, with three of each – and roll to harvest. The green dot on the die means you should harvest peas, the red dot means you should harvest tomatoes, etc. with the black dot denoting good soil – pick any vegetable you want! – and the white dot indicating that winter is on its way. If you roll white, choose one of the six winter pieces to place over the fall scene in the middle of the board. Your objective is for everyone’s gardens to be harvested before the winter scene is complete!

There are a few special rules to help with that. First off, you can help other people with their gardens! Whenever your roll would allow you to harvest, you can choose to harvest that color vegetable from a neighbor’s crop (and give it to them; you’re helpers, not thieves). This is especially practical when you’ve finished harvesting your own of that color, and your neighbor has not. If there’s none of that color left in any garden, reroll the die.

The other rules are even ~~cooler~~ warmer: as soon as your garden is completely harvested, you get to remove one winter piece from the board. Furthermore, when you roll white now, you get to remove another winter piece! If you’re thinking “but seasons don’t work like that!” …you probably don’t live in the Midwest.

If you’d prefer to play the extended version, it’s really easy to set up: just make planting a part of gameplay! The fall scene is actually its own set of tiles that cover the spring scene on the board (Why do we skip summer? Who knows!) so gameplay is the same, you just roll for what to plant and dread fall’s approach instead of winter’s. Or rather, before winter’s, because once you’ve finished planting – or fall has finished your planting for you, whichever comes first – you roll straight into the harvesting part of the game! I personally find this version much more fun because the better you do in the first half, the harder the next part is. And on the flip side, a really dismal planting season means you’ll probably be able to bring it all in before the frost! It’s a “glass is always full” situation, really.

What’s behind The Secret Door?

Combining spatial recall and luck with teamwork, The Secret Door is a cooperative rendition of the classic Memory matching game. In this version, players are detectives trying to determine which three Valuables are behind the Secret Door, using process of elimination… and they’re up against the clock!

Like Memory, there are two of each Valuable, ranging from a treasure map to a statue to a stack of cash. However, unlike Memory, three of these are chosen at random and hidden under the Secret Door, and the rest are shuffled in with the twelve Time Cards before being laid out face-down on the board.

Once it’s all set up, players take turns revealing two cards. Any Time Cards discovered are set face-up along the top of the board, while matching pairs of Valuables go to the Vault at the bottom. Mismatched Valuables are then returned to face-down before the next player’s turn. Try to remember what’s where!

If you have enough paired Valuables in the Vault that you think you know which ones are missing, you can (collectively) decide to make your deduction and check it against the cards under the Secret Door. You only get one guess, though, so use it wisely!

If the twelfth Time Card is revealed, the game ends immediately. Time’s up! You’ll have to take your chances now, regardless of how far from a definitive conclusion you are. How many of the hidden Valuables can you guess right anyways? We seem to have a 2/3 trend, whenever time isn’t on our side. (Or is on our side… of the board. The photographed game above somehow had Time Cards on all three spaces of the astronomy tower, which was a very disappointing couple turns.)

Caves & Claws

Caves & Claws is a cooperative board game, marketed for kids but fun for anyone. The premise – much like Quetzal, actually – is that you’re archaeologists trying to recover ancient artifacts.

First, you lay out the board. This is actually part of gameplay – from a shuffled set of path tiles, players take turns drawing one and setting it in their choice of orientation on an open space, until all spaces are filled. There are four spaces that don’t get paths: the two Temples in the middle of the board, and the two Caves on opposite corners. These are the Gathering Places, which will each have a face down pile of cards, four on each Cave and five on each Temple. The goal of path placement is to have as many routes between these spaces as possible, as well as at least one path leading off the edge of the board.

Next comes the part where you actually look for the artifacts. Starting from one of those entrance paths, each player will bring their pawn onto the board and into one of the Gathering Places, where they flip over the top card there (you can choose not to, but functionally, there’s little point in not). This card will be either a Treasure that you place on the Tent, or a Danger, in which case it blocks one of the open paths into that Gathering Place. If there are multiple open paths, you get to choose which one to block; this is no longer a viable route into or out of that space.

Finding yourself trapped? Don’t worry – the team has five Remedies that you can use to remove Dangers. This is done before you move, and both the Remedy and the Danger are set aside as out of the game. Be careful which Remedies you use, though, because they each only work on certain Dangers! There are also a few Dangers you don’t technically need Remedies to escape. These are the Door, the Tree, and the Boulder, which each have a gap you can squeeze through… at the expense of a Treasure already found.

Once you have all eight Treasures, have gotten all the Treasures minus those you sacrificed to escape, or have decided that collecting any more is too dangerous, all pawns exit the board through an unobstructed path off, and your rate of success is determined by how many Treasures you successfully recovered. Didn’t get them all? What can you do differently next time? On the flip side: was that too easy? Try playing with fewer Remedies! Or if you’re feeling really dangerous, no Remedies at all!

This game is great because it’s short, simple and adjustable in difficulty level… and who wouldn’t have fun scaring off monsters with Broccoli?

Pavlov’s Dogs

Brought to you by the same people who made Schrödinger’s Cats, Pavlov’s Dogs is a cooperative psychology game that will challenge your memory and your capacity for dog puns.

Players start the game by collectively deciding how many tests they’re going to play, and how many of each level, ranging from Easy to Very Hard, with 2 sets for each level and a bonus Silly set. Each set represents a different Dogtor, the likes of Sigmund Fetch and Immanuel Mutt, and, with a maximum of 1 from each set, the tests you draw are placed in the Dogtor folder faced down.

For each round, one player will be selected as Dogtor, and choose one rule to flip face up. This is the rule for the first test (Ex: scratch ear when Sit is played). The other players will be read this rule, and then dealt 5 cards each, face down, and take turns flipping their top card. Following any special instructions from the tests first, they conclude by listing the value of the test. For the first card played, this is the number in the corners; for the cards that follow, it’s that number added to the sum of the cards already played. The Dogtor will use the folder with the tests as reference, and say either “Good dog” or “Bad dog,” depending on if they followed the instructions correctly. If they got it wrong, the value of the test resets to 0, and that player loses one of their bones (everyone starts with 3). Your grade at the end is based on how many bones the group has left, so be careful!

At the interim between rounds, players can choose to shuffle around bones — this is advantageous because if a player loses all their bones, the game is over and you’ve failed your selected difficulty level. Then comes the hard part — a new Dogtor is chosen, a new test selected, and you now have to adhere to both the new test, and every test that came before it. Yup, that’s right — they stack! You thought one rule and simple addition was easy? Try five rules and simple addition, and one of those rules changes the value of some of the cards. Now play the game again with a new set of rules. Can you see why it’s a challenge?

It’s a true legacy to Ivan Pavlov, as well. After all, you really are training yourselves — specifically, training your memory and cognitive flexibility. And a lot like Lumosity, a mental training program I posted about here, I suspect if you recorded your scores you’d notice definitive improvement the more you played.

Now THIS is REAL Trivia!

One thing that has always bothered me about trivia games is how easy they are. Well, I’m glad to say that I have finally found a game where that is most certainly not an issue. For Christmas, my mother bought me Blinded By Science Trivia Game, a trivia game about just about every type of science. Because that name is really long, I’m just going to call it Blinded By Science.

Everything in this game, starting from the instructions, are science-y. The number of rounds in a game are the amount of colors in the rainbow for a short game, the number of the mission number of the Apollo spaceflight that brought Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to the moon for a regular game, and the atomic number of phosphorus for a long game. Granted, you can choose to play more or less rounds depending on timing, and yes, they did include the numbers for the rounds, not just the clues. The first player to go is whichever one most closely resembles Charles Darwin.

How many cards go on the table depends on how many rounds and players there are. Multiply the rounds by the players and lay that many cards face down on the table. Each card has a name on the back that gives some clue to what the questions are about (for instance, Elementary, My Dear, was about the elements, and Bring Me A Shrubbery is about plants.) Most cards have three questions, but some have extra credit as well. Each question is worth a point.

Some questions are True or False, some are multiple choice, and some are open-ended. True or False questions include, “True or False? Penicillin was the first antibiotic widely used in modern medicine,” and “True or False? The parrotfish eats coral and poops sand.” Multiple choice questions are rare and include, “Which of the following are killed, or their growth impaired, with the use of antibiotics: bacteria, fungi, or viruses?” and open-ended questions make up the majority of the cards, with questions like, “What acid is added to silicone oil to produce Silly Putty?” and “Tomatoes are a member of what often toxic family?”

The answers to these, in order, as I’m sure you would love to know, are False, True, bacteria, Boric acid, and the Nightshade family. Yes, there is actually a type of fish that poops sand. How does that work? I have no clue, the card didn’t say. Sometimes, the card does include more information about the answer. For instance, the question about penicillin I mentioned above said, “False (sulfonamides were first; penicillin was discovered in 1928, but was not used to treat infections until 1942)”. Personally, I appreciate these notes, particularly with True or False and multiple choice questions.

You play through all of the cards, and whoever has the most points wins. There is also a version of the game where you play in teams, working together to answer the questions and gain points, though I haven’t played that option.

Crossy Road

The other day, I was on my phone playing a game called Crossy Road when my mother looked over my shoulder and said, “Wait… you’ve downloaded Frogger?” I was naturally confused, as to me, Frogger is the game where you all sit in a circle with the “Detective” in the center, and the “Frogger” sticks their tongue out at the other individuals in the circle, causing the others to “die” while trying not to get caught by the detective.

So, as I have found to be wise when I am utterly confused, I asked her what she meant and then showed her how the game I was playing worked. She has since downloaded the game, which I take to be a good sign.

Crossy Road app In Crossy Road, you pilot your avatar (the starter is a chicken) across roads and rivers, avoiding many different obstacles, such as various speeds of cars and trucks, getting run over by speedy trains and jumping into an icy river in an attempt to cross it.

You play daily challenges, which can be anything from frightening three birds (background scenery; I barely noticed them until I got one of these challenges) to hopping four hundred times (every time you move is counted as a “hop”). To move forwards, you can just tap the screen, and if you want to move sideways or backwards you swipe in that direction.

Challenges and daily prizes give you “gifts”, which you open to receive a randomized quantity of coins. You can also get coins by jumping on them during the game. Once you get one hundred coins, you can “win a prize”, which is where you win a randomized avatar.

The avatars are grouped by category. I’ve been mainly using the Arctic setting since near the very beginning, when I won an Arctic fox, then later on an Arctic hare, and I believe my default right now is a puffin.

Every map has it’s quirks. the Savanna has ridiculously breakneck fast tourist buses, Australia has alligators in place of some logs that can snap up and eat you if you jump too close to their head, and Pac-Man has ghosts to avoid instead of cars, but don’t be fooled by the little pellets that Pac-Man eats in standard Pac-Man: they’re just for show.

Each avatar has it’s quirks, too. The pumpkin leaves a trail of candy that falls out of its top every time it jumps, the vampire spontaneously turns into a bat and then turns back, and if you have your volume on, you can hear that the piper really does play bagpipes!

Some of the avatars are awesome, some are strange, some are adorable, and some are downright impossible! There’s 3.1, the computer; the African termite, which is kind of freaky due to the blocky animations; the baby animals category, which has fawns and iguana hatchlings and baby bunnies… so downright cute; and somehow the plate of kimchi is able to move independently?

Woah, look at me… I haven’t even told you the goal of the game! It’s a game against yourself, so your goal is to beat your highscore, and possibly those on the leaderboard, if you’re more ambitious than I am.

You can also play multiplayer if the other players are using the same router as you are, in which case the goal is to see how far you can make it as a team.

Eyes of the Jungle

Eyes of the Jungle is a cooperative game where there are 8 artifacts that all have to get back to their spaces, but they’re blocked by obstacles. This little difficulty is especially amplified by the way the board is set up: the obstacles, remedies and artifacts are all mixed together and then placed face-down, so you don’t know whether you’re going to pick up an obstacle, which then has to be placed in its numbered space, a remedy, which is saved until you decide to use it in order to remove an obstacle, or an artifact, which stays in place and must move one space at a time towards its destination. Eyes of the Jungle

I enjoy the mechanics of this game, particularly the remedies. We did end up adding a couple obstacles to some of the remedies so that they made sense, and so that each obstacle had at least 1 way to clear it. That said, even with the additions, it’s still pretty hard.

The reason it is so challenging is because there are way more obstacles than remedies. I appreciate that, even as a game meant for young(ish) children, it’s actually pretty easy to lose.

Max

Max is a cooperative kids board game where you are trying to get the little critters (Chipmunk, Mouse and Bird) to the tree before Max (the cat) catches up to them. It was one of my first games and my first cooperative board game. Max

I like the aspect of choice. A lot of kids’ games, you just pick up the card and hope it goes in your favor. In Max, you get to choose which critter to move on a given turn.

I think, if you put your mind to it, it’s pretty hard to lose. I wouldn’t know, because recently my goal has been to make the cat win. Meanwhile the other player (my cousin) has been trying to get the animals to the tree. Thus, it can also be a competitive game. In the picture above, my cousin had successfully gotten the chipmunk to safety when I rolled double black, so Max ate the other two.

I think the treats and trails are cute. There are four cat treats, so if Max gets too close to the critters for your comfort, you can call him back to his starting point. There are also trails, one for each critter. When they land on their trail, they take the trail to wherever it ends. They’re effectively shortcuts. Unfortunately, Max, if he lands on it, will also take the trails.

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